IX
Joe and Ikey Menzies had been out of jail for a couple of months, their comrades of the Workers’ party having scraped together the bail. Now came their trial, with several other members of the party. The state was undertaking to show that this organization was nothing but the Communist party under a camouflage; it was the “legal” part of the organization, but the real direction was in the hands of an “underground” group, which received funds and took orders from Moscow. It advocated the forcible overthrow of the “capitalist state,” and the setting up of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” after the Russian pattern. On the other hand, the indicted men claimed that they had organized a legitimate working-class political party, and their attitude to violence was purely defensive. They believed the capitalists would never permit the power to be taken from them peaceably; it was the capitalists who would overthrow the constitution, and the workers would have to defend themselves.
The prisoners were all tried at once, and the procedure took three weeks and was quite an education in contemporary problems—or would have been, had the newspapers reported both sides. To get the workers’ side, you had to sit in the court room; and Bunny went whenever he could get loose from the university. He was there when the prosecution sprung a “surprise” witness, and it was a surprise to Bunny also—his boyhood friend, Ben Skutt! Ben, it appeared, had grown a moustache and taken a course in the Moscow dialect, and had turned up as an oil worker out of a job, and been admitted to the Workers’ party, and before long had got a job in the office. Now he had harrowing stories to tell of the criminal things he had heard said, and of efforts the party had made to incite the oil workers to rise and destroy the wells. On the other hand, so Bunny was told by Ikey Menzies, the Communists were ready to swear that Ben Skutt had himself done all the proposing of destruction—at the crisis of the strike he had spent his time insisting that the only way to save the situation was to get a bunch of real fighting men and burn up half a dozen oil fields.
Bunny went home to his father. “Dad, just what was it made you get rid of Ben Skutt?”
“Why, I found he’d been taking commissions from the other feller. He’d been up to other rascalities, too.”
“Just what?”
Dad laughed. “He had a scheme that was a wonder. You know, down there at Prospect Hill, people were in a crazy hurry to drill; the owner of the next lot was getting his well down first, and draining all the oil away. Ben and another feller would find a bunch of lot owners jist on the point of making a good lease; and Ben would have his pal give him a quit-claim deed to one of those lots. Ben would record the deed, and of course, when the title company come to report on the property, there was that cloud on the title. The owner would come hustling after Ben Skutt in a panic, what the hell was this? And Ben would look shocked, and tell how he had bought the lot from some feller in good faith. Who was the feller? Well, the feller had disappeared, and nobody could find him. But there Ben had the lease tied up, and the drilling couldn’t start. The lot owner would rage and swear—all the lot owners in the lease was all tied up together, and nobody could do anything with their property till that one lot had got free. To go into court and clear the title would take six months or so, and meantime the chance to lease would be gone; so the owners would have to chip in and pay Ben five thousand or so—whatever he claimed he had paid to the other man.”
“I should think that trick would have been tried a lot of times,” remarked Bunny; and Dad answered, it would be tried just long enough for the news to git round, and then some lot owner would stick a gun under Ben’s nose, and settle it that way. What had happened in his case was the usual thing, a woman had got hold of him and plucked him clean, and that was why he was doing spy work for the patriotic societies.
Bunny knew that his father didn’t owe anything to this slippery rascal, and wouldn’t mind his being exposed, provided Bunny’s name was not dragged in. It would be easy to trace the matter down, by looking up Ben’s real estate transactions in the county records; he would have given a quit-claim deed to the lot owners whom he had held up, and if these men were still in the neighborhood, no doubt they would testify, or could be made to. Bunny saw Rachel at the university next morning and told her the story, and gave her a hundred dollar bill to cover the costs of a title search. She passed it on to Joe or Ikey, and two days later Ben was confronted by half a dozen infuriated citizens, male and female, who did a good deal to shake the jury’s faith in his testimony as to secret conspiracies in the Workers’ party! The jury disagreed in the case of all but two men, the leading party directors; these got six years apiece, but the Menzies boys got off, and the party held a celebration, which was described in the newspapers as an orgy of red revolutionary raving.